In recent years, the use of web-based applications has become commonplace. For many businesses, success and failure can depend on the health and availability of these web-based applications. For example, if a customer cannot complete an online transaction efficiently and the provider cannot quickly identify and fix the problem, the customer may move on to complete the transaction elsewhere. In this regard, many web application monitoring tools provide incident detection, notification, root-cause analysis, historical data reporting, and the like, thereby creating an environment of constant improvement and a high quality of service. For example, such data can help identify bottlenecks, reduce the likelihood of outages, and lower costs associated with maintaining complex web applications.
As the web application environment increases in complexity and the number of transactions grows, successfully maintaining a web application becomes increasingly difficult. Today, the sheer volume of transaction data is not always capable of being processed by a single server. Indeed, application performance monitoring data is frequently distributed across different servers or even different groups or “farms” of server, which may even be in different locations and maintained by separate IT groups.
Performance problems that are identified on one server are frequently relevant to users of other servers as well. Currently, there is no application to synthesize information gathered at different servers or groups of servers so as to provide a comprehensive transaction visibility across an entire infrastructure of web monitoring servers.